Hi, I am Paul Bloom and I’m a Professor of Psychology at Yale University.
And what I want to do today is talk about the field psychology, the science of the human mind.
Now, I’m admittedly biased, but I think psychology is the most interesting of all
fields.
It’s the most interesting because it’s about us.
It’s about the most important and intimate aspects of our lives.
It's about language and perception. It's about our memory of things, it's about our dreams
Love, hate. It's about morality our sense of right and wrong.
It's about when things go wrong, as in depression or anxiety,
it's about happiness.
It's about everything that matters to us.
Psychology is a huge field and it breaks up into different sub fields.
Some psychologists study the brain, they study neuroscience,.
The question of how this physical lump of flesh we have
gives rise to our mental life.
Others, like me, are Developmental Psychologists.
We study how babies turn into children and how children turn into adults.
How does a baby or child think differently than an adult.
How much of it is hardwired?
How much of it do we have to learn?
Some psychologists study Social Psychology.
Which concerns the relationship of people to other people.
As with regard to question like prejudice or persuasion.
Others are Cognitive Psychologists.
Cognitive psychologist treats the brain like a complicated computer.
And asks questions like how do we solve computation problems
like understanding language or recognizing faces or remembering facts.
Some Psychologists approach this from an evolutionary perspective
Looking at the question of how the mind evolved.
and how the origin, the evolutionary origins of the mind
give us insight into how we think in the here and now.
Many people when they think of psychology they think of clinical psychology
they think of Dr. Phil and Freud and
people who are involved with mental illness.
and alot of psychologists do study this.
One huge and important field of psychology involves exploring the
diagnosis and the causes
and particularly the treatments mental illnesses.
Illnesses like schizophrenia, depression,
obsessive compulsive disorders, phobias.
and so many other things.
I'm going to talk about 3 separate case studies.
I'm going to talk about compassion.
racism, and sex.
And I'm going to use these case studies as a way
to introduce you to psychology.
The first case study is compassion.
what I mean by compassion is concern for other people.
This is particularly interesting to me.
This is my own research program and my own laboratory at Yale; we look at the emergence
of morality in babies and young children.
And we particularly focus on the emergence of compassion.
At what point in development do babies care about others?
At what point in development does feelings of empathy and sympathy, sometimes anger,
guilt, other moral emotions. How do they arise?
To what extent are they built in?
To what extent do they have to be learned?
As a starting point, I have here a picture of a baby
and inside the baby’s head is the baby’s brain.
The baby’s brain is an extraordinary computing machine.
There are by some estimates
100 billion neurons in a babies brain.
Now neurons are basic cells
that process and transmit information.
And by one estimate, there’s about 1.8 million connections between neurons that are created
per second.
To give you a feeling of the complexity of the baby’s brain, I use an analogy from
Jeff Hawkins.
Imagine a football stadium.
Fill it up with cooked spaghetti, then shrink it to the size of a soccer ball.
Then make it much, much, much denser.
And then you’ll have some understanding
of how much is going on inside a brain,
inside even a babies brain.
Now, that much we know for sure,
but where the real debate goes on
concerns the nature
of that computational structure.
There’s one of view that is held by many
philosophers and many psychologists which is that the
brain starts off as a blank slate, what the philosopher, John Locke, called “a Tabula Rasa.”
And what goes on in development, the point of all those connections per second is learning,
is sucking up information from the environment.
The baby starts off knowing nothing and turns into an adult, by virtue of absorbing information
at a tremendously powerful rate.
Many philosophers and many psychologists, including me and my colleagues are more enamored
of another view.
We don’t deny that learning takes place,
but we would argue that in addition to that,
there is an extraordinary early understanding, early specialization.
The brain could better be understood in terms of what the psychologists, Leda Cosmides and
John Tooby, described as a Swiss Army knife, has many different parts.
And each part is specialized for a different function.
Now, so much of the action in psychology has been a running debate over which view is right.
And this concerns morality.
Both moral judgements
right and wrong
but also moral feelings
including compassion.
Many people would argue that in that regard, the baby starts off with nothing.
The idea is that children start off immoral,
monsters or if not monsters,
at least they know not from good and evil.
This is not the view which I think is supported by the data.
I think there is now more and more data in support of a different view of compassion.
One way to make a baby cry
is to expose it to the cries of other babies.
There’s sort of contagiousness to the crying.
It’s not just crying.
We also know that if a baby sees another human in silent pain, it will distress the baby.
It seems part of our very nature is to suffer at the suffering of others.
We know that young babies,
as they become capable of moving voluntarily will share.
They will share food, for instance,
with their siblings and with kids that are around.
They will sooth.
If they see somebody else in pain, even the youngest of toddlers will try to reach out
and pat the person.
Maybe hand over a toy.
There’s some lovely studies finding that slightly older children are able to help others
when they see somebody who is unable to fulfill a goal, they’ll seek out to come to their
aid.
So one elegant demonstration of this comes from a recent set of experiments
Where they take a toddler
put him or her in a situation
where an adult is in some sort of
mild distress and see if the toddler
will voluntarily help
even without any prompting.
And they find that toddlers typically do.
There seems to be some sort of impulse in us that’s altruistic, that’s kind, that’s
compassionate.
In all of these cases; however, the kindness that we see seems to apply to people who are
close to us, who are either physically in
our proximity or who are our siblings or our
parents or our friends.
So the question arises, how broad does this compassion extend?
Now some people would argue that we start off with a very broad compassion, we would
extend it to all individuals, to all people.
But there’s evidence support a somewhat different view, which is, there’s a moral
instinct in us, there’s a moral sense in us, but it’s initially very narrow.
It’s only triggered by those close to us.
In fact, our natural default feelings towards a stranger, far from being compassionate,
is actually some sort of mixture of fear and hatred.
We see this in all sorts of different ways.
So in young children, we see it in what’s called, “stranger anxiety.”
At around nine months of age, babies start becoming panicked at the presence of strangers.
and it sees to capture a universal part
of development where the other is thought of as dangerous.
This sort of stranger anxiety fades in some cultures.
If you were to find yourself in an airport
in a new city, you’re not likely to have
a panic attack because you’re surrounded
by people you don’t know. But in small scale
human societies, it might never go away.
In a situation when an individual is raised with a few hundred other individuals around
them, that is their circle of compassion.
And their response to others is not positive.
This is an observation that’s been made
by many anthropologists who study small scale
societies.
So for instance, anthropologist, Jared Diamond, talking about small scale societies in papua new guinea
writes, “To venture out of one’s territory to meet other humans, even if they
lived only a few miles away, was equivalent to suicide.
Many years before, Margaret Meade was talking about the lifestyles of what were called at
the time, “primitive cultures.”
And she is famously a supporter of these lifestyles.
She argues that the Western world would be much better if we were to adopt the customs
and thoughts and ideas, particularly in regard to sexuality of these other societies.
But she was very honest and very blunt about how members of these societies treat strangers.
She writes: “Most primitive tribes feel that if you run across one of those sub humans
from a rival group in the forest, the most appropriate thing to do is bludgeon them to
death.”
I’ve talked about fear and hatred, but there’s a third sort of response that we often give to strangers.
This is disgust.
Disgust is what Paul Rozin described as the “body/soul emotion,” is a human universal.
Humans everywhere are disgusted by certain things.
We are disgusted by feces, urine, blood, vomit, rotten flesh, and most meat.
Disgust has a characteristic facial response
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and its easy part of our natures.
Now, if it was limited to food and cockroaches and that sort of thing, it wouldn’t have
anything to do with my talk on compassion.
But what’s most interesting is that we’re often disgusted by other people.
Particularly, we’re often disgusted by strange people.
By definition
any category of human individuals
is something you either
belong to, or you don't.
It's either what psychologists call
an in group or an out group.
And we have laboratory research that explores
the relationship between feelings of disgust
and feelings towards out groups.
So we know for instance that people differ in how easily disgusted they are.
You do a survey of people.
You ask them questions like, how badly would this bother you.
So one of the questions might be, you have to pick up a dead cat with your hands.
And there’s some people who say, “uh, whatever.”
Some people, “Oh my god!
I’d rather die”.
Or, you sit on a city bus seat
and it’s warm from the last person
who was on it.
And some people crack up, well why would that bother me?
Other people say, “That’s very disturbing.”
People differ in how sensitive they are to disgust.
It turns out that where you stand with regard to disgust correlates with your feelings about
out groups.
It correlates with your feelings about immigrants; it correlates with your feelings about sexual
minorities, in particular male homosexuals.
The more easily disgusted you are, the more aversion you find to these others.
We also know this experimentally.
We know that by making people be disgusted,
we can make them meaner. I’ll give you an example of this.
This is from a study I was involved with, with David Pizarro at Cornell University as
the lead investigator.
What we did was we brought people into the lab… into a lab at Cornell.
And we asked him all sorts of questions regarding their feelings towards different groups and
different policies.
What do you think of African-Americans?
What do you think of gay men?
What do you think of welfare? What do you think of immigration?
And so on and so forth.
Half the people just filled it out and went home.
The other half of the subjects went into the room, got the same survey.
But the difference was, before they entered the room
we sprayed the room with a fart spray.
That’s the first experiment I’ve ever been involved with that used a fart spray.
People would be kind of grossed out.
And it would make them meaner.
Not towards everything, but it would make
them particularly meaner towards out groups,
like male homosexuals.
And this supports the idea that there’s a connection in our minds between a visceral
emotion of disgust and our feelings towards others.
So what I’ve argued is, we do have a natural compassion,
but it’s limited. It does not naturally extend to others.
But that raises a puzzle
because you and me and everyone else we know
can extend our compassion to strangers.
To put it in the language that the philosopher Peter Singer has used,
“Our moral circle has expanded.”
It might be that our ancestors, it might be the people in small scale societies only
cared about their family and friends.
But we have a broader circle of compassion.
We think about we care about people in other countries.
We care about people from other races.
We care about people we’ve never seen before and we never will see.
When some sort of disaster strikes like a tsunami or a hurricane, many
of us give our resources, even our blood, to help out people we’ve never met before.
And that poses a neat psychological puzzle.
What forces take our narrow moral circle, our narrow scope of compassion and
bigger and expand it to care for these others?
Now I think that there are a lot of different answers to that question.
Robert Wright, for instance, has argued that one force in expanding the moral circle has
been human interconnections in commerce, in international travel and so on.
The more people you know, the more people you have contact with, the more we are interconnected
in the world, the more you might care about them in a sort of self-interested altruism
where you care about them because they’re fates are intertwined with yours.
And I think that there’s a lot of value in that insight.
But I want to focus on a more
psychological more individual based mechanism.
for expanding our the moral circle.
A mechanism that happens to individuals
as they get older
part of devleopment.
which is, their sympathies expand because of a certain
sort of persuasion.
I want to suggest that there is psychological evidence that supports the idea that we can
expand our compassion, our moral circle to
far away strangers by being made to think
of them as if they are individual people.
We think of them as if they’re our friends and family.
We think of them as if they are right in front of us.
Joseph Stalin famously said, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”
And Mother Theresa presented a similar sentiment when she said, “If I look at the mass, I
will never act.
If I look at the one, I will.”
Psychologists like Paul Slovic has explored this in the lab.
So for instance, they would do a study where
they would have an appeal for a charity.
And in fact, they would take the money they got and send it to the charity.
And they would, for one group of subjects, describe the problem in terms of statistics,
in terms of numbers, in terms of the millions of people suffering, a sort of suffering a
proportion of the population who is in desperate need.
And they found that people would give say, roughly a dollar.
For the other group, they didn’t bother with statistics at all.
They didn’t bother trying to impress them with the huge number of people suffering.
They told them a story about a single individual.
They had a picture of that individual, they gave her a name.
And when you do that, you find that people are far more generous.
It’s a far more powerful effect on their compassion.
They will give, roughly, twice as much.
Charities, when they try to appeal for people’s
help, won’t throw numbers at you.
They typically won’t because they know that
doesn’t work.
The way to extend people’s compassion, the way to motivate altruistic action is to appeal
to some very natural, very hardwired systems within us that respond to individual people.
I think it’s a tremendously persuasive way for a charity to work.
And I think more generally, as part of the story for how our compassion can get bigger
and bigger.
People talk about moral progress.
People have argued that through our history,
our moral circles have been expanding.
We now live in a world where people believe we have moral obligations to other races,
other nationalities that sexism and racism are immoral.
Consider the end of slavery in the United States.
There are a lot of different factors that led to the end of slavery, but many historians
would argue that one of the forces that led many white Americans to believe slavery was
wrong was persuasion, in particular, it was the work of the author Harriett Beecher Stowe
in her book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
In this book, she didn’t make logical arguments; she didn’t make theological points or philosophical
proposals.
Rather, she got her readers to extend their sympathies.
And this had a profound effect.
It had a profound effect persuading them that
slavery was wrong
so part of morality, part of right and wrong
is intimately connected with compassion over our feelings towards others.
Some scholars like David Hume,
argue that a sense of empathy, a sense of compassion
is aptly central to becoming a fully moral being.
And certainly notions of right and wrong
come up in the domain of race.
Cause the very question of forming stereotypes
and forming attitudes towards human groups is morally fraught.
The second case study I want to talk about is racism.
And I want to begin by making a connection to a branch of cognitive psychology.
In particular the branch of cognitive psychology that deals with how we make sense of the world.
How we naturally form categories of the things we see and the things we interact with.
Cognitive psychologists have pointed out that in order to survive in the world, we have to make generalizations.
You probably have never seen those three pictures I have up here, but you immediately know that
one is a dog and one is an apple and one is a chair.
You will also have intuitions about these things… you’ll make generalizations.
You’ll believe the dog can bark, the apple is something you can eat, a chair is something
you can sit on.
Now, you probably also realize that there are exceptions to this.
Some dogs are silent, some apples are poisonous, some chairs will collapse if you sit on them,
but still if you couldn’t make those generalizations, if you didn’t recognize that some properties
tend to co-occur with some objects, you would be helpless in the world.
You wouldn’t know what to eat, you wouldn’t know how anything would react; you wouldn’t
survive.
Part of being a successful human, in fact, part of being any successful animal is being
able to learn.
And a good part of what learning is is to make statistical generalizations on the basis
of limited experience.
You eat a thousand apples, they all taste pretty good, you conclude, I can eat apples,
apples taste good.
And when you’re hungry, you reach for the apple.
This is adaptive, it is rational, it is reasonable.
But now there’s a twist.
The twist is that some of the categories that we form are categories of people.
We form categories on the basis of sex, of age, of
race, profession, religion, sexual orientation, nationality, and where the person lives.
When we form categories of people, we often call these stereotypes.
Now, stereotype may sound like a bad word, but there’s nothing bad about it.
For one thing, stereotypes are often accurate.
We’re reasonably good statistical learners, and so we tend to be reasonably accurate.
Also, stereotypes are often positive, particularly of groups that we ourselves belong to.
Some of the statistical generalizations may be correct and may be positive as some groups
have reputations for being smart, for being loyal, for being brave, for all sorts of things
that are not at all negative.
And so there’s nothing inherently wrong about stereotypes.
On the other hand there are several problems with stereotypes.
For one thing, they’re reliable insofar as they’re based on a sample, an unbiased
sample, of the population.
But a lot of the information we get about human groups is through biased sources like
how they’re represented in the media.
And if these sources don’t give you an accurate rendition, you’re a stereotype won’t be
accurate.
For example, many Italian-Americans were upset at the depiction of Italian-Americans in a
television show, “The Sopranos.”
This is because, if you are in an area where the only Italian-Americans you meet are those
you see on TV and those you see on “The Sopranos,” you’re going to think they’re
all mobsters.
Many Jews historically have been troubled by Shakespeare’s depiction of Shylock.
If the only Jew you know is Shakespeare’s Shylock, again, it’s going to be a very
bad impression.
And so one problem with stereotypes is while we have accurate statistical mechanisms for
taking in information and drawing conclusions from them, often our information isn’t reliable
and often this can lead to the formation of stereotypes that aren’t right.
A second problem is that stereotypes regardless of whether or not they’re accurate can have
a negative effect on the people that they apply to.
And this is what the psychologist, Claude Steele, described as stereotype threat.
So he has a vivid example of this.
Here’s how to make African-Americans do worse on a math test.
You have the test and you put on the test that they have to identify their race.
The very act of acknowledging that their African-American when given a test ignites in them thoughts
of their own stereotype, which isn’t positive, which is negative regarding academics and
that makes them do worse.
Want to know how to make a woman do worse on a math test?
Same thing, get her to write down her sex.
One recent study found a sort of clever twist on this.
The study involved testing Asian-American women.
Turns out, when Asian-American women are given a test and they’re asked to mark down their
race, they do better than they would otherwise do.
They’re reminded of the stereotype, but as a positive stereotype and it bumps them
up.
You ask them, on the other hand, to mark down their sex, they do worse because they’re
women and that’s a negative stereotype towards women.
That’s an example of how stereotypes have a potentially damaging effect on people.
A third problem with stereotypes is, in some way, our stereotypes of human groups are like
our categories of dogs and apples and chairs.
But there’s a way in which they aren’t.
We’re not dogs and apples and chairs.
But we are members of human groups.
And this fact of how you connect with the category has an effect on how you think of
the category.
There’s a lot of evidence suggesting that when you’re a member of the category, you
boost it.
You give it higher qualities.
People in your group are smarter or nicer, they’re more deserving and so on.
On the other hand, if it’s an out group, if it’s another category, particularly if
it’s a category that you’re in some way competing against, the category gets denigrated.
We see some vivid historical example of this.
In one study in 1942, Americans were asked to describe the top two features of Russians.
And they described them as brave and hard-working.
In 1948, they were asked the same question.
They described them as cruel and conceited.
The Russians didn’t change, what changed was our relationship to them over the intervening
years; they went from being part of a group that we were a part of to the out group.
The final problem with stereotypes is a moral one.
Even if stereotypes are perfectly accurate, even if they’re accurate summaries of the
statistics of a group, there are many cases where we believe that it’s morally wrong
to judge somebody based on their group membership.
We should judge them as individuals.
For all of these reasons, and maybe mostly for the last one,
there’s an interesting tension in how we think about other groups.
On the one hand, we want to be consciously egalitarian, consciously non-racist, consciously
thinking of individuals as individuals and not letting stereotypes, particularly ugly
stereotypes affect our judgments.
And there’s some evidence that we succeed at this.
You look at the statistics, for instance, what you see in this graph, is there are a
portion of Americans who say they would vote for a qualified African-American to be President.
And what you could see is, at a certain point by the mid-nineties, just about everybody
says, that they would.
And the election of Barrack Obama shows that this wasn’t just people lying when asked
questions, it really reflects an honest to god consciously egalitarian viewpoint.
On the other hand, we also have an unconscious system.
And an unconscious system is more statistics driven, more biased and less sensitive to
moral concerns.
So you get a tension between the conscious egalitarian system and the unconscious system,
which is often driven by bias.
This conscious, this unconscious system is data-driven
and it is a lot less sensitive to our moral concerns than the conscious system.
One striking example of unconscious biases involves
being shown these two faces.
And asked who is more American?
Well at some level this is a ridiculous question.
You would laugh when they hear it.
Barack Obama is more American cause he's like American.
Tony Blair is British.
But unconsciously you can ask the same question.
You can see how quickly it takes to associate
these faces with words like American or not American.
And it turns out based on this sort of implicit unconscious test
people are often more willing and quicker to
associate the face of Tony Blair as American
than the face of Barack Obama.
Of course because Tony Blair has a white face
and Barack Obama has a dark face.
Now, one response to these sorts of studies, one perfectly legitimate response I think
is say, who cares.
Consciously, we’re egalitarian, consciously we’re non-prejudice, we have these weird,
quirky unconscious biases that drive our behavior
when pressing buttons and responding fast.
What difference does it make?
But there’s evidence it does make a difference.
There’s evidence that these unconscious biases play a role in things that matter very
much in the real world.
So consider some studies by Jack Dovidio and his colleagues.
They first did this study in 1989, and what it involved is, you give people resumes of
candidates and these resumes have pictures.
And what the subjects and experiment don’t know is they were always given the same resume,
but half of them got it with a white person, half of them a black person.
And then they were asked, how strongly would you recommend this person for a job?
Now, if these candidates had strong qualifications, they both would be recommended.
In fact, perhaps the black is a bit more likely to be recommended than the white one.
But when they had moderate qualifications, when it’s a judgment call, the white candidate
was statistically more like to be recommended for a job than the black candidate.
Not because these people said, I’m a racist, I’m going to do it this way,
but rather they are swayed by this factor that they might not have been conscious of.
As I said, this was done in 1989.
But they did the same study in 1999 and got the same result.
And they did the same study in 2005, and got the same result.
So, we’re at war with ourselves.
We have on the one hand these conscious beliefs about how we think we should think, how we
think we should behave.
On the other hand, we have this unconscious system that makes all these sorts of decisions
and affects us in ways that we might not know about, we might not be aware of.
The good news is we’re also smart.
And part of being smart means that we can structure our world so that we can make it
that unconscious biases matter less.
To give you an example of this, I’ll turn not to race, but to gender.
Not too long ago, women were deeply underrepresented in symphony orchestras.
And the reason for this, it was argued is because they don’t play as well.
In a fair and biased fashion they’d been judged and they just don’t
sound as good.
But in part, based on these sorts of discoveries, symphony orchestras began to hold blind auditions.
What they would do is they would have the person play behind a screen.
The judges won’t know if they are listening to a man or to a woman.
Once this was put into place, the representation of women in symphony orchestras shot up.
It wasn’t that originally these were just sexist, to say,
I don’t like women; I’m going to count against them.
Rather, these were perhaps good, non-sexist people, who couldn’t help hearing the woman
differently from the man.
And I like this example because it shows how first, social psychology and psychology in
general can shape policy in a good way.
But second, it shows how we’re smart enough to manipulate the world so that our better
selves get to make the decisions.
The third case study I want to talk about is sex.
And when it comes to sex, considerations of evolution become incredibly relevant.
I think the question of how we evolve and the question of how our minds are now shaped
in response to evolution pressure is something that pertains to all of psychology.
It pertains to, certainly, for how we think about human groups, certainly for compassion
and morality, and all sorts of other topics I haven’t discussed, like perception and
language and memory.
But it’s screamingly obvious in the domain of sex.
As soon as you start thinking about our bodies and our brains, you’re faced
with a puzzle.
And it’s the sort of a puzzle that can only be resolved in terms of evolution.
And here’s what the puzzle is.
What’s the difference between males and females?
Well, there’s a general answer to this that doesn’t pertain to any particular species
that goes across every creature on earth.
The males are the ones with the small sex cells.
To be a male is to have a sperm, which contains genetic material, and that’s basically it.
The females have the large sex cells.
The female sex cell, the egg, also contains genetic material but it contains a cover,
it contains food, it contains all the apparatus needed to get an organism growing.
So here’s the puzzle.
You look around most animals, not all animals, but most animals.
And the male is bigger and more aggressive.
So why would the animal with the smaller sex cell tend to grow up to be the bigger animal.
And this has been a mystery for a very long time until an evolutionary biologist named
Robert Trivers, solved it.
And he solved it by making reference to the idea of parental investment.
Trivers defines parental investment as any investment by the parent in an individual
offspring that increases the offspring’s chances of surviving at the cost of the parent’s
ability to invest in other offspring.
Given the different size in the sex cells
it means that males typicaly have less investment than females.
Because in most, though not in all species
the offspring grows inside the females body.
And while that offspring is growing inside the females body
the male is free to have other offspring, but the female is not.
for humans for instance a man can ejaculate
then moments later or hours later
or however much later can ejaculate again.
And there's virtually no practical limit
to how many different offspring a man can have.
For a woman when she get's pregnant
she can't have more kids during that period.
In fact it is difficult for her to have kids even later on when she is breastfeeding.
So there is a fairly small number of offspring
a female human can have.
This makes a difference,
it makes a difference. It makes a difference in the
sort of economic game theoretic structure.
of human sexuality.
What follows from this from an economic point of view
is that males compete with on another
for access to females.
Both males and females want offspring, that’s the genetic imperative, but males can be more
into number while females can be more into quality.
This leads to competition between males.
And the competition is of two different sorts.
There’s competition male against male, which leads to the evolution of aggressive trades.
It even leads to the evolution of some species with special organs, like the giant horns
of some animals that exist for males and not females because they’ve evolved according
to this reproductive logic based on the lower parental investment.
It also leads males to evolve certain traits to attract the attention of females.
Females are the scarce resource here.
Females as a rule are more choosey
when it comes to short term sexual partners than males.
And so males compete with one another to attract females.
The most striking biological example of this
is the elaborate, glorious plumage of the peacock.
There’s a carton I enjoy here because the peahens are saying to the peacock,
“Cut the crap and show us your willy.”
Which I like because it sounds sort of British, but I also like because it nicely captures
the evolutionary logic behind what all of this is for.
Finally, you get to relative choosiness.
Females are, as a rule, more choosy when it comes to short-term sexual partners than males.
And this shows up in a couple of ways, it shows up in prostitution.
So, prostitution is a huge industry in the world.
And with very few exceptions, prostitutes cater to male customers.
Then there’s pornography.
Now, pornography may appeal to different sexes, some people have argued that romance novels
are sort of the equivalent to pornography for women.
But what appeals to men is often sort of images of sexually receptive women.
This isn’t the same as sort of a one-night stand, but is a psychologically vicarious
one-night stand, where this image is enough to lead to arousal.
The only thing interesting I have to say about this is a recent study that suggests this
is not exclusively a human vice.
So recent study involved showing pornography to Rhesus Macaques, these are a type of monkey.
The question was, would these monkeys pay to see porn?
And so you didn’t have a financial system for these monkeys, so they set up a nice apparatus
where at a certain point, the monkey had a choice, he could either stare
at a picture or turn and sip sweet orange juice; monkeys love orange juice.
So the question is, what sort of pictures would they pay, would they give up on this
orange juice in order to see?
And there were two sorts of pictures that they would pay to see.
They would pay to see the behinds of female Rhesus monkeys and they would pay to see the
faces of high status male Rhesus monkeys.
Sort of like the equivalent of a Playboy Magazine and People Magazine, suggesting that two of
the major human vices, pornography and celebrity worship are in fact not uniquely human.
Now, you can go on about the differences between males and females in terms of sexual interest
and sexual hues and so on, but I want to focus for the rest of this case study on certain
things we have in common.
And one thing that we have in common is an attraction to what we would call beauty.
Certain things are beautiful, certain things appeal to us universally.
Some studies find in the first tenth of a second after looking at a face, you have computed
how beautiful it is.
Cultures differ tremendously, different times, different places
in what counts as beautiful, what counts as sexually attractive.
And that is entirely true; there are interesting and powerful differences.
But at the same time, there are also universals.
There are certain things that people everywhere find attractive.
And we can use evolutionary theory to makes sense of the sort of things people find as
beautiful.
So to some extent, beauty equates to youth.
Hues like round eyes, full lips, smooth tight skin.
Most likely it is because they are cues the person is young,
is able to have kids, has many years ahead of them.
And so on.
Beauty also equates to health.
We are drawn to features like
absence of deformities, clear eyes, unblemished skin
intact teeth, and average faces.
And you might think, average faces?
That’s strange thing to put in beautiful, as a category of beautiful.
But it turns out average faces actually look really good.
So what an average face does is it gets rid of all of the things that are unusual and
people tend to find it quite attractive.
Now one accusation that always comes up in these situations is,
who did you get this data from?
And in fact, psychologists are often guilty of collecting data from 24 university freshmen
and then saying that these conclusions apply to all of humanity, but not in this case.
In this case, studies of human attractiveness have been done cross-culturally and you get
pretty much the same findings wherever you go.
Again, there’s some interesting differences, but these universals seem to always be attractive.
The work that’s most exciting to me along these lines is actually done with babies.
So adults can rank faces as attractive or unattractive, but you can also see what babies
think about faces.
And it turns out, using babies looking time as a measure for what they like to see.
So how long will they look at a face?
It turns out that babies preference for attractive faces match pretty well adults preferences
for attractive faces.
So for instance, in some wonderful work by Languar[ph] and her colleagues, she would
show different degrees of averageness across faces, composites of more and more people.
You can see this in these faces are not the faces of real people, these faces are computer
composites of multiple people and they are not bad looking, but you can get better than
average for both males and females.
For females, many people will judge a face better than average if it’s feminized.
If you take the features that define a face as female and you exaggerate them, as in the
picture on the right, it tends to look a little bit better than your average female face.
For men, you could do the same thing.
you can take faces and
take your average male face and turn it into testosterone man, which is the face that you’re
looking at on the left.
It turns out that women’s responses to testosterone man differ according to whether or not they’re
ovulating.
So if a woman is ovulating, she is more likely to find this manliest of man face attractive,
while if not, she tends to go back to just find average man more attractive.
And there's different theories of precisely why this is so.
It does suggest that our sexual psychologies connect with our reproductive preferences
in all sorts of interesting ways.
But there’s a lot more to looking good than how you look.
It turns out, how attractive you find a face
is critically dependent on how much you like the person.
The more you like somebody, the better they look to you.
This is why spouses and happy marraiges
will honestly find their husband or wife
far more attractive than anyone else finds them.
This is true more generally.
In a classic study, David Bus,
tested people from 37 different cultures around the world
and asked who is your perfect mate?
He was largely looking for sex differences in theses studies
and he found them, he found all sorts of differences
in what men were looking for and in what women were looking for.
But he also found one similarity, one thing
one way in which women and men were alike.
And this is that for both, the number one quality
people were looking for in a mate
was kindness.
All of this in the domain of sex
supports a moral from Shakespeare
which is "love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind".
What I have done is I have very briefly talked about
three case studies in the domain of psychology.
I talked about compassion,
I talked about racism,
and I have talked about sex.
In the course of this I've tried to illustrate
certain themes in the study of psychology, in general.
And in fact I started by listing six domains of psychology.
Neuroscience, I started by talking about the babies brain
and gave that as a starting point
for the question of the development of compassion
the development of these other traits.
but every domain of psychology every
aspect of our mental life
is caused by our physical brains.
And in fact, in all of these domains I’ve talked about, compassion and moral psychology
and more general, race and stereotyping and thinking about groups, and sex and sexuality,
people have used the methods of neuroscience
to better understand how the mind works in these domains.
I’ve talked about development and I focused mostly in development on the first case study
of compassion, but of course there’s a huge amount of very interesting research on the
development of our understanding of groups asking the question, for instance, are young
children racist?
Do young children have complicit biases?
And of course in the development of romance and sexuality, how does the mind of a child
before puberty differ and how much is it like the mind of an adult after puberty and how
did these differs take place?
These are extraordinarily interesting developmental questions.
All three domains connect to social psychology and cognitive psychology in clear ways.
They are all questions about social psychology, they are all questions about dealing with
other people; how we deal with and make sense out of other people.
And they all connect to questions of cognitive psychology, like the perception of faces,
the formation of categories, the comprehension of stories; those are all central parts of
cognitive psychology and central to understanding the domains we’ve talked about here.
We’ve talked about evolution, particularly again, in the case of sexuality.
But of course, the evolutionary psychology of morality and compassion is a fascinating
issues connecting it with research done with other primates, our evolutionary relatives
like chimpanzees and monkeys.
I’ve said the least about clinical psychology.
Clinical psychology is extraordinarily interesting and also connects to each of the domains that
I’ve talked about.
People are interested in the psychopathology related to sexuality.
They’re particularly interested in the psychopathology in mental illness in the domain of morality
because this connects to one of the most troubling and one of the most interesting questions
in clinical psychology, which concerns the psychopath.
There are some of us, apparently, who don’t have consciences, who don’t feel compassion,
who will destroy other people’s lives out of malice or self-interest or simple boredom.
And the question of where psychopaths come from, what’s the precise nature of what’s
going wrong with them.
Most of all, what can be done about them are issues of extraordinary interest.
Psychology is the perfect liberal arts major
because it connects across all these interesting disciplines
and gives you intellectual tools, tools that we share
with philosophers and we share with chemists
and we share with people who study english literature.
It brings them all together in the project of studying the mind.
Every interesting question in psychology is also an
interesting question for scholars outside psychology.
We've made huge progress over the last many years
in understanding mental life.
And I think there's no reason to expect this progress to stop.
I think that in the end
the most important and intimate aspects of ourselves,
how we understand people, our emotions, our motivations
our desires, our sense of right and wrong.
can be understood through the methods of scientific psychology
through constructing and testing hypotheses.
Through bringing to bear considerations
based on evolution.
and computation and neuroscience.
Now, some people might find this a scary prospect.
I know that there are some people that worry that a scientific perspective of the mind
takes away from us somehow.
It diminishes us.
It makes us less than what we are.
I don’t agree.
I have the opposite reaction, which is that as the more you understand the mind from a
serious scientific point of view; the more you come to appreciate its complexity, its
uniqueness and its beauty.
Thank you.